I'm On a Roll

Toilet paper roll “portraits” modeled after the work of French artist Junior Fritz Jacquet.  Much like the Stop Motion Animation project from earlier in the semester, this was an assignment I quickly found myself obsessed with.  Like that one, I became consumed by the iterative process, starting something new from a point of ignorance, making discoveries, and trying to refine my methods as I went.  I really appreciated working with wet cardboard.  With a medium like clay, it’s so malleable that if the end product is terrible (and it usually is) I’m completely to blame.  It’s my own technical incompetence.  A soggy toilet paper roll can be manipulated, but only to a point.  It’s difficult by any reasonable person’s metrics.  I find that I need that balance between freedom and constraint to quiet the hypercritical voice in my head.  If I screw this up, how much can I beat myself up?

I attempted at least 10 of these hideous little bastards, stopping only because I ran out rolls.  Some of them ripped, some disintegrated, some of them just didn’t look enough like faces.  The ones you see here were the most successful of the bunch.  I’ve already started collecting more materials, including larger paper towel rolls, to continue playing with this concept outside of class requirements.  If I die before figuring out how to form a convincing nose, my entire life will have been in vain.

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History's Greatest Monster

The task for this assignment was to come up with a “monster” that would be born from the imagination of our fictitious culture, and then construct it out of cardboard.  I had a hard time coming up with something that would terrify a population that was addicted to technology while staying within the parameters we were given.  The obvious answer was to embrace the “yin” to technology’s “yang”: Nature.  I thought that was a little too obvious, plus, I didn’t love the idea of having to make plants and sticks and rocks out of cardboard, when I have a whole pile of the real thing sitting within arms length from a previous project.  I considered making something with giant scissors for hands, and calling it the “Cord Cutter” but then, plenty of people I know use that term in the positive, to signify ditching cable in favor of digital streaming services.  It’s aspirational, not frightening.  Not to mention the fact that most of the devices people are addicted to don’t use wires or power cords these days anyway.  I thought about a monster that when it clapped its hands, emitted an EMP that disabled electronics, but then, do most people even know what an EMP is (an electromagnetic pulse) and how do you convey that concept through difficult to manipulate cardboard?  Another loser.  What is something truly terrifying to technophiles?  The antithesis of all they stand for?  A creature so abominable, they dare not admit that it exists, for to do so would be to admit that God must also exist, and he has forsaken them?

This is Dave.  He works for Geek Squad.

He’s the guy your grandma calls when her computer stops working, and you’re not answering your phone.  He has no real expertise, charges an obscene hourly rate, and takes all day to accomplish what you could, for free, in half an hour…if you weren’t screening Granny’s calls.  Dave from Geek Squad is a monster, but he was birthed from one far more loathsome: You.  The selfish, disinterested grandchild, fully aware that your refusal to accept the minor inconvenience of assisting a (supposed) loved one would spawn such a beast, and yet doing it anyway.  You hate Dave from Geek Squad not because he is a monster, but because he is a mirror.

I got a little flowery there.  Basically, you only see this dude when something is broken, and whether he is of help or hindrance is as predictable as where the wind will blow.  He’s the technology addicted society’s version of the Baba Yaga.

He’s also about 15 inches tall, and made from Amazon boxes, toilet paper tubes, and empty 12 packs of Mountain Dew Zero Sugar.

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The Devil Came Down to...Wherever This Is.

The imaginary culture I’ve been working with this semester, as originally proposed, revolved around the idea of a society addicted to technology.  I’ve waivered back and forth over whether I wanted to stick with this concept, but at this point in the academic calendar, it feels weird to bail on it.  We’re so close to the end, might as well see it through.

The assignment this time was to create a “tunnel book” depicting the main thoroughfare of our fictional society.  My culture isn’t that far removed from contemporary society, aside from the fact that they’re gelatinous blob people, like humanoid Gummy Bears.  As such, I figured their city streets wouldn’t look much different from our own.  I wanted to depict some kind of significant event happening behind a populace too distracted by their devices to notice.  I went through multiple iterations of what this “event” might be, from nuclear attack, or an impending asteroid strike, to a rampaging Godzilla.  As is so often the case, my grand ideas were quickly mitigated by my skillset and my supplies, so none of those came anywhere close in execution to what they were in my mind.  I took stock of what I still had available to me, and noticed that while I’ve burned through tons of construction paper this semester, I’ve barely touched the red colored sheets.  And thus, Main Street was visited by the giant, disembodied head of the Devil himself.

In retrospect, I should have been more conscientious of the whole while constructing this thing.  I planned it out pretty well in advance, but didn’t take the time to spot check the way the various panels were playing off of each other as I went along.  Because of this, the various pages feel much more cramped than I was anticipating, which flattens the feeling of depth and obscures some of my background elements.  I also wish, having now viewed my classmate’s versions of this project, that I’d been a bit more ambitious and elaborate with my designs.  I stuck to very simple, rudimentary shapes as I knew I could comfortably cut them out of paper.  If I ever do this again, I’m going to pony up the $2 for a scalpel and try to ramp up the complexity.

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